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Women hidden in history
Books that go beyond the "great man" theory of history
While it's often true that "behind every great man is a woman", there are also plenty of women standing on their own, overlooked by historians of the past. Here are some of their stories.
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Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome
Did you know that Roman emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, nor Nero were related by blood to their predecessors? Scholar of the Roman empire Guy de la Bédoyère takes readers into the lives of Livia, Octavia, and the elder and younger Agrippina the true backbone of Rome’s dynasty.
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Women in the Middle Ages: The Lives of Real Women in a Vibrant Age of Transition
In a lively historical survey that charts the evolution of women’s roles throughout the period we learn of Hildegarde of Bingen, an abbess who was a noted composer and founded two monasteries; of Eleanor de Montfort, a 13th-century Princess of Wales who was captured by Edward I and held as a political prisoner for three years; and women such as the spouse of an Italian merchant, and a peasant’s wife.
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Last Woman Hanged: The terrible, true story of Louisa Collins
In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a 41-year-old mother of ten children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the last woman hanged in New South Wales, Australia. Both of Louisa's husbands had died suddenly and the Crown, convinced that Louisa poisoned them with arsenic but lacking anything other than the thinnest circumstantial evidence, put her on trial an extraordinary four times until they got their conviction. This is the story of a small group of women who, despite not even having the right to vote, rose up to try to save Louisa's life, arguing that a legal system comprised only of men—from the Premier down to the all-male jury—could not justly sentence a woman to hang.
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Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
Wry and witty, this book explores the lives and exploits of fourteen women with a lot of blood on their hands. At the same time, it’s a witty and somehow light-hearted exploration of female aggression and predation.
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Sisterhood of the Squared Circle: The History and Rise of Women’s Wrestling
This book serves up more than one hundred profiles of women who made an impact in the world of professional wrestling. Some of the biggest names you can expect o hear include Mildred Burke, the Fabulous Moolah, Mae Young, Penny Banner, Wendi Richter, Trish Stratus, Chyna, Lita, Charlotte, Sasha Banks, and Bayley.
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Composing a Life
Cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson delves into the lives of five women at the end of the 20th century to reveal the creative potential in each of us as we go through the phases of our singular lives.
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Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls
Journalist Angela Sterritt blends memoir and investigative reporting in this book about growing up Indigenous while struggling to survive in a society that has long turned a blind eye when a woman like her goes missing or turns up murdered.
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Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas
This is the story of real women and female figures of lore who through the ages sailed the seven seas in pursuit of plunder. From ancient Norse princess Alfhild and warrior Rusla to Sayyida al-Hurra of the Barbary corsairs; from Grace O'Malley, who terrorized shipping operations around the British Isles during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; to Cheng I Sao, who commanded a fleet of four hundred ships off China in the early nineteenth century.
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Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman
Elizabeth Abbott looks at some of history's most infamous and fascinating women, from antiquity to today, asking how they came to occupy this role as “the other woman.”
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Bomb Girls: Trading Aprons for Ammo
Everyone knows the “Rosie the Riveter” posters from WWII, but what was life really like for the women who worked in the factories that drove the war effort? This is the story of East of Toronto, Canada’s largest fuse-filling munitions factory turned out tons of high explosives in a dedicated effort to help win the war through the labour of thousands of women.
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(Re)Presenting Wilma Rudolph
Born black in Jim Crow Tennessee, Wilma Rudolf was the twentieth of twenty-two children and spent most of her childhood in bed suffering from whooping cough, scarlet fever, and pneumonia. Later a bout of polio condemned her to a life on leg braces. Yet she became a high school track star, earning a scholarship to Tennessee State and in 1960 she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games. This is her incredible story of perseverance.
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The Heroines of SOE: F Section, Britain's Secret Women in France
In 1942 Britain’s Special Operation’s Executive was running out of recruits and began looking to women as an untapped war resource to aid in the liberation of Nazi-occupied France. Here is the extraordinary account of all forty SOE agents of F Section.
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In Her Own Time: A Class Reunion Inspires a Cultural History of Women
At a class reunion, Maggie Siggins was struck by the wide range of fascinating life stories she heard told by her classmates. These women were born during the war, came of age in the ’60s, and became adults in the midst of the women’s movement of the ’70s. Siggins set out to write the life stories of her classmates, using the emerging themes from these intense dramas as a gateway to explore women’s lives throughout history. The result is a compelling series of personal journeys and a cultural history of women in the Western world, from antiquity to the present.
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Red Roses: Blanche of Gaunt to Margaret Beaufort
Despite what stacks of historical fiction and movies would have us believe, The Wars of the Roses were not just fought by men on the battlefield. Behind the scenes were daughters, wives, mistresses, mothers, and queens who exerted their influence on the most dramatic of English conflicts. This book traces the story of women on the Lancastrian side, from the children borne by Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, through the turbulent fifteenth century to the advent of Margaret Beaufort’s son in 1509 and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty. These are women who in the face of grave danger managed to keep their heads while others were (literally) losing theirs.
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